James' World 2

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Rooftop construction at a high-rise building undergoing conversion to apartments in Manhattan’s financial district in New York City, April 11, 2023. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews

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But is all sitting created equal?

Some folks say sitting on the ground is actually good for your health, and should be done regularly ― a concept that almost seems too good to be true.

Below, experts shared with HuffPost the pros and cons of sitting on the floor — and why no one posture is ideal.

Sitting cross-legged on the ground can be good for mobility and flexibility.

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But there’s one holiday you may know little about — even though, for many, it is the most important of the year.

Read on to learn about the history, present, and future of Juneteenth, the oldest celebration of the end of slavery in the United States.

Juneteenth Honors a Significant Moment in History

Many people think of Emancipation Day (the end of American slavery) as Jan. 1, 1863, the day President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring “all persons held as slaves … shall be then, thenceforward and forever free.”

But it wasn’t until June 19, 1865–2.5 years later — that news of the proclamation finally reached the quarter-million slaves living in Texas. That’s when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to make the announcement, reading, “The people of Texas are informed … all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves…” 

The name “Juneteenth” marks this historic day literally, as a combination of “June” and “19th.”

In Texas, a Long Delay Keeps Slavery Alive

Why was there such a long delay to abolish slavery in Texas?

Many white landowners in Texas, as elsewhere, resisted granting enslaved Africans their freedom, and because there weren’t many Union troops in the state to enforce the new order, they were able to keep Black people enslaved for long after they were officially declared free. (It’s also worth noting that the proclamation only applied to enslaved people in the confederacy and not to Union-loyal states like Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Mississippi.)

Even after Granger arrived, some Texas slaves remained in bondage for several more years.

Other Stories Emerge to Explain the Delay

Many folkloric stories have been shared over the years to explain the delay in Texas. As one story goes, it took more than two years for a messenger traveling by mule to make his way from Washington to Texas. In another tale, this messenger was murdered on his way to delivering the news.

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Juneteenth celebrations

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If it seems like things are kind of off these days, you’re not alone. Recently, more than 100,000 people liked a post marking the start of the pandemic that said, “[Four] years ago, this week was the last normal week of our lives.”

Objectively speaking, we are living through a dumpster fire of a historical moment. Right now more than one million people are displaced and at risk of starvation in Gaza, as are millions more in Sudan. Wars are on the rise around the globe, and 2023 saw the most civilian casualties in almost 15 years.

H5N1 bird flu has jumped to cows, several farm workers have been infected, and scientists are warning about another potential pandemic. According to data from wastewater, the second biggest COVID surge occurred this winter. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at least 24,000 people have died of COVID so far in 2024.

Last year was the hottest ever and recorded the highest number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. Not to mention that over the past few years, mass shootings have significantly increased, we’ve seen unparalleled attacks on democracy and science, and mental health issues have skyrocketed.

Truth be told, things were bananas even before the pandemic: just think of the Great Recession, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and Brexit. Academics use terms like “polycrisis” and “postnormal times” to describe the breadth and scale of the issues we now face.

Welcome to the new normal, an age where many things that we used to deem unusual or unacceptable have become just what we live with. Concerningly, though, “living with it” means tolerating greater suffering and instability than we used to, often without fully noticing or talking about it. When authorities tell us to “resume normal activities” after an on-campus shooting or give guidance on how to increase our heat tolerance in an ever-hotter world, we may sense that something is awry even as we go along with it.

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It didn’t take long for me to recognize the low bar awaiting me as a new father. In the early, bleary days of parenthood, I was congratulated for relaying the vaguest details of my son’s whereabouts and received pats on the back for explaining the origin of his name. New moms were rarely granted the same level of enthusiasm; they couldn’t delight a crowd by remarking on whatever precociously cool song their kid smiled along to. Meanwhile, I had only the faintest grasp of my son’s diaper size. I remember the approving nods I received from strangers when I folded his stroller or produced a clean pacifier from my pocket. As he grew into a state that one is contractually obliged to call “cherubic,” people would offer their seats and a sympathetic smile when we boarded the bus, my son wielding a remote control, for some reason.

It’s nice when random people smile at you, yet few of these interactions felt truly meaningful. They merely confirmed a basic competency, an ability to not completely flub my lines. How we behave, at home or in public, is a product of our innate impulses and feelings in concert with the expectations of our surroundings. For the modern-day American father, prescribed identities can be contradictory. On one hand, there’s probably never been an age that so values a kind of chill sensitivity among fathers; witness the dawn of the #girldad, the think pieces about new frontiers in hands-on fatherhood, the mainstream rejection of the withholding, stoic paterfamilias archetype. And, yet, I’ve never been bombarded with so much frothy anxiety around masculinity and testosterone. In an age of declining global birthrates, it is, in the eyes of figures such as Elon Musk, about fathering, rather than fatherhood.

Perhaps it’s safest to keep expectations low. For a while, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, hewed to the belief that males were simply wired differently; one of her initial forays into academic research explored the penchant for infanticide among male langur monkeys. She spent much of her career studying the behaviors of primates, particularly the reproductive and resilient survival strategies of females. In 1981, she published “The Woman That Never Evolved,” which argued that traditional views on evolutionary biology hadn’t accounted for the ways in which female primates had developed instincts for competition, independence, and sexual assertiveness. In 1999, she published “Mother Nature,” a history of mothers and infants, in which she explored the idea of the “allomother,” a term she popularized to refer to anyone other than the birth mother who helps to care for an infant.

“Father Time,” Hrdy’s latest book, picks up where “Mother Nature” and “Mothers and Others,” published in 2009, left off. Her interest lies in how external forces shape what’s happening inside our bodies, and vice versa. She contends that the emergence of more egalitarian norms of parenthood aren’t just changing society; they could change the biochemical makeup of men, too.

Hrdy writes of the researchers Katherine Wynne-Edwards and Anne Story, whose “shared interest in what renders males caring” spanned species. Wynne-Edwards had studied the mating habits of Campbell’s dwarf hamsters, found in China, Russia, and Central Asia. Male hamsters don’t just stick around pregnant females—already a rarity—they are integral parts of the birthing process, nuzzling with their partners and “oh so delicately” assisting with delivery. Wynne-Edwards found that levels of prolactin, a hormone that’s responsible for lactation and that affects a mammal’s immune system and metabolism, rose in the male hamster as his mate’s pregnancy progressed.

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Photograph by Peter Marlow / Magnum

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